The comparison I made 91% top federal tax rate to 35% top federal tax rate. You seem to be adding current local taxes and your double social security (aka self employment tax). They had state and local taxes in the 1960s too.
Our government doesn't not cut spending because of politicians stranglehold on power. Government spending does not get cut because government spending is popular.
Some voters say "don't cut education, we need to invest in our future." Some voters say "don't cut defense, we need to be strong in a dangerous world." Some voters say "don't cut farm subsidies, we need to save the family farm." Lots of voters say "don't cut Social Security, I paid into that for years and I deserve my share." Some voters say "don't cut police and fire."
Voters hate taxes. Voters love their favorite government program. Many people think there is this magic "government waste" which is really someone else's favorite program.
One thing you and I agree on is that neither party reduces the National Debt. Reagan and GHW Bush tripled the national debt. Did you complain about it then? Suddenly Republicans are worried about the debt. They didn't seem too worked up about it from 1980 through 1992. They didn't worry about it for the last 8 years.
I have been a 1099 contractor before and have paid the self-employment tax in the past. Now I am an employee and my employer has been doing "more with less" even when he got the Bush tax cuts. I know him on a first name basis. I appreciate the risks he takes to keep the doors open. But I don't have the same point of view as either him or you. I have been paying my taxes for almost 30 years now and you don't see me crying martyr over it. Man up.
If taxes are raised, small businesses will have a harder time hiring more people and keeping the employees they have. If the Obama Administration and Democrat controlled congress did not spend money on a stimulus bill like this, small businesses would still shed employees because people have less credit, are scared and spending less.
I live in California and I'm staying put. There is plenty of infrastructure to work on here and I will be paid to do my part.
Before I recently looked it up, I remember there being a 90% tax bracket in the US. But that was a long time ago.
Then I looked it up. In the early 1960's, that was when the top tax bracket was slightly more than 90%. Now, the top tax bracket is 35%. So if you are on the top end of the US income distribution, your taxes have been going down for the last 50 years.
So if you are quite wealthy, your taxes have been going down down down for 50 years. When politicians say "were going to have tax cuts," guess who gets the biggest share? God forbid a politician say he is only going to raise taxes on people who make more than $200,000!
Somehow, the right has gotten most of us to identify with the wealthy and act as if their taxes are our taxes. Maybe its because as Americans we can all imagine starting a business and becoming a millionaire. But most people don't. Even most business owners don't make a million.
It seems to me that cutting taxes for the wealthy to create jobs for the rest of us has been tried over and over again and where are we now?
Many economists think that creating jobs though public sector jobs is less efficient than through the private sector. But this approach has been tried over and over since the 1980 Reagan revolution and where are we now? I say lets give public sector job creation a chance.
The private company I work for gets nearly all its money from the public sector.
I let a lot of my early programs go. I had them on 9 track digital tape, at 6250 bpi. I had converted some of them from the lower bpi rates before. It used to be that each employer I worked for had one of those tape drives and I could access the files when I wanted to. But not anymore. Besides, would I really want to convert FORTRAN programs? In theory, I could have kept converting them to newer and newer storage media, but I didn't. Later on, I had one of those QIC tape drives that could hook up to a floppy disk controller. I think I have those files backed up on a hard disk somewhere -- I think. When I was going through old backups one year, I noticed I had the same directories appearing many many times. I spent hours selecting the best version of everything and then backing up that too. I haven't digitized all my vinyl record albums either, even though it is theoretically possible. I have not scanned all the 35 mm slides or prints I took going back to the 1970s. At some point, the new stuff going on in your life gets more interesting than converting the stuff that used to get you excited 25 years ago.
Imagine how hard it is going to be to preserve people's papers after their dead. Do you want to keep converting someone else's stuff when you have a few terabytes of your own to attend to?
I think I even let the mainstream media convince me that my bank, Washington Mutual, went out of business!
Why they even know where I live tried to tell me that the house next door went into foreclosure!
In all seriousness, I noticed with interest when Alan Greenspan testified that he was surprised that lending institutions did not protect their own long term interests and instead went for short term profits in massive and questionable loan originations.
Personally, I think it is pointless to argue over whether the current administration is to blame for all this. I think that there is plenty of blame in the private sector. To a certain extent, both major parties supported the following positions:
- never say you are going to raise the average person's taxes - never reduce the national debt - never reduce total government spending - never tell Americans they have to sacrifice - deregulation is great! - globalization is great!
I think that if we all let go of worrying about our favorite political party looks good or bad, we can start talking about whether these policies we've had should be continued and what we can do to get our country out of this mess.
I remember taking partial differential equations from the Math department as a Physics undergrad. My friend also took the class as an Electrical Engineering undergrad.
The math students were having a really tough time picturing what we were talking about but we Physics and EE students had already seen Electro-Magnatism in Physics. We could look at the equations and see a physical problem that matched it.
One week, there was a problem assigned that the Math TA could not solve. My friend and I had solved it the night before, fueled by beer and pizza (as was our habit) and he went to the board to show the rest of the class.
So as a gross generalization, the Math people are more rigourous, skipping fewer steps and avoiding "hand-waving." While the Physics people have a good picture in their mind as to what the math means. Physics people rarely study math that has no physical application.
Math people take abstract algebra and Physics people rarely do. Physics people use non-commutative algebra without taking all the rigorous background.
In my opinion, these accidental releases of radioactive material pale in comparison to the atmospheric tests the US used to do before it was banned in 1963.
I've tried the "do your research, then buy the stock" approach. If I was honest and tracked the return of all my trades over time, I never really beat the S & P 500.
Now I am following an approach detailed in Ric Edelman's "The Lies About Money."
The result is 14 positions, all but are one ETFs. His point is that the secret is not the big gain but avoiding the big loss. With certain stocks losing 90% of their value, trading stocks is taking the chance that you won't be holding one of those turkeys. So when you are holding one of those turkeys and it is down 25%, psychologically you don't want to let go of it so you hold on for another 10% loss. And another and so on. Once you have taken such a loss, you would have to really hit several out of the park just to break even again.
With 13 ETFs, I am in thousands of stocks and I will barely notice if one of them goes out of business. When the business articles are saying "switch to value stocks" I watch my growth ETFs go down and my value ETFs go up. When everybody gets scared, I watch the stock ETFs go down and the treasury bond ETFs go up.
I never have to decide what the next hot thing is going to be. I just maintain the asset allocation ratios. If a position in the portfolio exceeds the target percentage by 20%, I sell the amount it is over. Likewise if the position drops 20% below the target percentage, I buy the amount to restore it. So I end up buying low and selling high.
Since I switched to this approach, I have been beating the S & P 500 in a down market.
So what you think is dilution is actually just avoiding big losses, from which you will never recover.
I like Comedian Ron White's routine about this. He starts out by saying his mother called all upset:
"I just heard on the news that we're at terror threat level orange, what do I do?"
He says "I don't know."
Then he says "Nobody knows."
His system has two levels:
1) "find a helmet 2) "put on the damn helmet"
In the event of an emergency, the terror alert level will raise to "find a helmet," in which you should find a helmet. If the threat is real, then the alert level will raise one step higher to "put on the damn helmet."
At least everybody knows what to do. I suppose the TSA folks and law enforcement have some different list of things they do at different levels. For us civilians its:
Yellow: be alert, report suspicious packages, etc. Orange: be more alert, report suspicious packages, etc.
It seems that the people who are bringing flaws to light are cast as the villains, while nobody even considers blaming or even questioning the people who selected a poorly-implemented system to run an entire city's public transit.
I love how so many people act as though the ticket vending machines are equivalent to "the entire city's public transit." Having the TVMs hackable until they patch the code will only impact revenue slightly. Note you can accomplish the same thing by jumping over the turnstyles. In the San Francisco Bay Area, they give everybody free rides when the air quality gets too bad.
There are not that many vendors of TVMs and each transit system has custom requirements.
Security researchers are in a catch 22. If they don't publish vulnerabilities publicly, they never get fixed. If they do, they never get thanked. It goes with the territory. You will only get the admiration of your fellow geeks, not the population as a whole.
Given that this has been a headline for at least 12 hours now, I did some reading.
A motive that was given in this news account was that he was working on a vaccine for Anthrax and wanted to test it.
There was also some evidence that before the 2001 anthrax attack, he had conducted tests outside of normal work protocol. His attorney stated that he had been cooperating with the FBI for more than a year. There is also a report that he was forcibly removed from his job due to his becoming unstable.
The impression I get is that he had psychological problems that drew the attention of authorities. Those same problems may have made it hard to deal with the pressure of an FBI investigation of more then 12 months.
There are reports of evidence that in he same time frame as the attacks, he removed anthrax material from work to do his own tests. These tests may or may not have been related to the attacks themselves. There are also reports that he was about to be indicted.
I count myself in the group of developers that used Linux for a few years, then switched back to Windows.
I had and have one PC at home. To run Linux, I set that machine up dual or triple boot. I was running Red Hat for a while until they changed it into Fedora. I worked with Fedora for a while, but they had a bug with dual booting that they would not only not fix, but called it a feature. I got as far as the version of Fedora that had SELinux in it. Someone told me "Debian is better." I had that as a partition for a while. But I like trying out new software development frameworks and that made for incompatible library versions and apt-get didn't help. I mostly kept with the Fedora, fought the SELinux configuration and got it under control. Then the one PC died.
At this point, I had spent huge amounts of time fiddling with Linux and faced more basic problems, like knowing how much money I had in my checking account.
So I went out and got another PC with Windows pre-installed. It came with Quicken, which I already knew how to use. Later, when I really got into digital photography and purchased Adobe Photoshop Elements. It not only seemed more intuitive then GIMP, it also allows you to organize your photos within the program. When I started shooting RAW mode with my DSLR, it handles that quite nicely too. I also got an iPod and started listening to more music than I had in years. Since I was no longer trying to keep running Linux, it was not a problem.
This is despite the fact that I have spent 25 years developing software and have many years of Unix experience. I might have thought all that time spent becoming familiar would help me at work. Maybe it did a little. My employer had one contract that I worked on which familiarity with Linux played a role. But otherwise, my employer has about 70 employees, no IT department, and as far as I know, no one else who knows Linux. If I were successful in introducing anything there that ran under Linux, guess who would be supporting it? They have me doing this other job that would not go away while the Linux training and support ramped up.
In my regular job, I select hardware to install as part of integrated systems. I may deal with 20 or 30 such devices while traveling to the customer job sites. All of them either have web configuration or require you to install a support program under Windows. If I were to adopt the stance that I would only run Linux on my work laptop and reject equipment that did not support Linux, we would not be able to complete our jobs and would have a hard time explaining to the customer why we could not complete the job. Actually, I would just get fired and they would hire someone who doesn't have a problem running Windows on their work laptop.
So I run a mix of closed and open source applications on Windows and am happier since I gave up depending on Linux. I have all that free time now to pursue other things. If I want to run Linux, I can boot a Knoppix CD. But I don't really do that very much anymore.
I have been following this story in the San Francisco Chronicle.
According to their reporting, he was asked by management for the passwords. He said no. Then he was asked by police for the passwords. He still said no. Then they had him arrested.
The reporting by various news organizations has been marred by confusion on the part of reporters and average people between controlling network hardware and controlling data on various servers. They often seem to describe it as data being stored on the network he controlled.
It has been my experience that non-technical people do not really know what a server is. These days, most people have an idea what a network is (like the Internet). So they think either their data is stored on their desktop/laptop or it is stored on the network.
If it is true that he sometimes did not write the router configs to flash, that sounds to me like a "deadman switch." If he got hit by a bus, how would they service the UPS that backs up the router? The batteries eventually need to be replaced. He may have built it so that he had to be around for years to keep it running. It is running fine for now, but they can't power anything off without potentially losing its configuration.
One city official essentially said something like "Worst case, we hire someone to reconfigure or replace the entire network."
Since he plead not guilty, he will get a trial to determine if what he did was criminal.
I haven't seen the movie yet, but I heard an interview with Andrew Stanton.
It was interesting where he got a lot of the ideas for the movie. He also talks about traditional animation versus CG and how CG really helped his career because his drawing skills were ok but not great.
There are two sides of national politics, principles and compromise.
Senator Obama reversed himself on retroactive immunity because he felt the FISA bill was a good compromise. I can't site it but I remember him being quoted as saying there were adequate protections in the bill and that overcame his objections to retroactive immunity.
Where this is a change from the past seven years is this:
Our current president is known for is never changing his mind no matter what happens. People used to think that was a virtue, but look what has happened. Bush will say over and over that he will veto a law that contains "X" where X is some principle he is against. As a result, there has been no movement on some issues.
Obama is showing that he is the opposite. He will compromise with people he disagrees with and change his mind. Some may see that as expedient. I see that as a good alternative to having two groups stand on opposite sides of the room never reaching an agreement while big problems go readdressed.
As a lifelong Democrat with left of center views, I struggle between being pissed off at Democrat Senators (like Dianne Feinstein) who often vote against my own opinion and also wanting all these legislators to work together and make some headway against the growinglist of problems our country faces.
Sure I'm upset at retroactive immunity. But I can't vote on only one issue because I think that the environment, the deficit, the falling dollar, rising oil prices, immigration, health care are also important.
The struggle for me is that on the one hand, I want Democrats and Republicans to work together to solve some of these problems. On the other hand, I'm not always happy with the result.
If a politician signals that they are never going to change their vote, then no one bothers to change the bill in order to get your vote.
If you can find someone who sticks to their principles and never changes their mind, go ahead and vote for them. But that sounds like what we have had for the last 7+ years -- same old same old.
> If you really believe that anything that doesn't support IPv6 at this point is "legacy" you clearly haven't tried to implement it. A few things off the top of my head: > > * Cisco IOS will route IPv6, but it does doesn't do it in hardware (it forces the packet up to the totally underpowered CPU of the router), so the packet rates are pathetic compared to IPv4. >
Is that true of CISCO layer 3 switches? I'm just curious. It was my impression that layer 3 switches did their routing in hardware. The routers, which have WAN ports, do things in software. They both run IOS.
A friend of my Mom's had this happen to their family.
They came home from a trip, came upon armed buglers in their home. The bad guys already had the drop on them. The father went for the gun in his briefcase. He was shot dead. His son was injured in the same incident.
You might think you can sort all this stuff out and make the right decision when it happens. Or you might get angry or scared or overcome by the desire to protect your family and wind up dead.
Maybe you think you are smarter and would be able to trick the guy with the gun on you. Hey, it happens a lot in the movies. Let's hope you never find out.
Also by having guns in your household, you run the risk that one of your household becomes so distraught that they would use the gun on themselves or someone else in your family.
Let's say that your wife decides you are cheating on her and sobbing and finds your gun just before you get home. What might have been an argument can instantly turn into someone getting killed.
So on the one hand, the gun might make you safer. On the other hand it might make you less safe. The way the US constitution is today, you get to choose. I choose not to have guns. You might choose differently.
I think a big reason we are not drilling offshore - the reason for the ban -- is the 1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill. This caused a lot of average folks to join the environmentalists and push for the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the offshore drilling ban.
Now you don't hear so much about rivers catching fire, GE dumping huge amounts of PCBs in the Hudson River, LA has better air than it used to. Acid rain was also brought under control. In a way, offshore oil drilling in the past created the power the environmental movement in the recent past. But fewer and fewer people remember seeing pictures of California beaches covered in oil and dead birds.
If the ban were lifted, it would be at least 10 years before the oil and gasoline would make it to the market. As we go past peak oil, on our way to producing a fraction of potential demand, we as a country have to decide how much of the environment we want to risk in the transition away from oil. It is a political decision and no doubt will be a issue in the election.
After working hard all year to pay bills, buy things, and drive back and forth to work, I need nice natural places to go on vacation to. I have lived in California since the 1970s and I can tell you the beaches are great. Some of them are part of the Pacific Flyway and have lots of different bird species. I like Point Reyes and Bolsa Chica particularly.
But that's just my opinion.
Our political system for everyone motivated by their values to apply pressure into the process. I think McCain is going to lose a lot of those Women's votes he was supposed to pick up from Clinton over the offshore oil drilling proposal. Pluralism at work!
The bulk of voters like big government but hate to pay taxes.
The politicians of both major parties know that when they try to make government smaller, the people that benefit from the area being cut start squawking and taking their votes elsewhere.
Some people like a strong defense (big Department of Defense). Some people like farm subsidies (protect the family farmer). Some people want more government employees to enforce existing regulations (think SEC, EPA, USDA). Some people want NASA to get space colonies going -- mission to Mars! People actually like government but don't want to pay for it. They vote for the person that tells them they can have all that AND A TAX CUT!
So the politicians talk about cutting taxes then talk some vague talk about government waste but avoid specific cuts like the plague.
When the average voter cares about deficit spending more than tax rates, that's when we'll start getting cuts in total government spending.
If you think of the recent Republican administrations (Reagan, Bush I, Bush II), which ones cut the size of government? Which one put an end to deficit spending? Reducing the size of government is political suicide.
Yes, it's a shame. I can honestly say that I use the OpenOffice spreadsheet every day and it works great. I also really like OpenOffice draw and use the Writer and presentation portions all the time.
These people believed that a spaceship companion to the Hale-Bopp comet had arrived to take them to the "next level". They returned a telescope they had purchased when it failed to show the spaceship. Obviously the telescope was defective.;)
They all killed themselves in order to get on board the spaceship. Apparently, it never occurred to them to question their own beliefs.
Nuclear Power is subsidized by the U.S. Government in an interesting way.
In order for the first and any subsequent private nuclear reactors to even be built, the Congress passed a law capping the amount nuclear reactor operators could be held liable. The operators are required to obtain $300 million per plant in insurance. If claims go beyond that, the industry is on the hook to provide a pool of money to pay claims beyond that $300 million. They are not required to provide this money until an accident occurs and even then, the payments per operator are capped at $15 million per year up to a maximum of $95.8 million. Any amount after that $395 million is to be picked up by the federal government and eventually the taxpayers.
It was felt by Congress that the private nuclear power industry would never get off the ground otherwise because private insurance would never cover potential liability. In addition, GE threatened to get out of the nuclear power business if this law was not passed. (Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Hearings Before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy on Governmental Indemnity and Reactor Safety, 85th Cong., 1st sess., 1957, p. 148.)
Also, the government has agreed to ultimately take all spent nuclear waste. That is another function you would have a hard time having private industry take on.
Unlike HIPPA, which requires destruction of data, the White House is subject to the various laws mandating the preservation of all presidential records.
This includes the Presidential Records Act of 1978. This states that upon leaving office, white house documents become the property of the government. A different law, the Hatch Act, prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan political activities.
In order to address the Hatch Act, about 88 people who work in the White House were given separate computers purchased by the Republican National Committee and given email addresses in the domain gwb43.com, georgewbush.com, and rnchq.org.
It appears that White House staff consciously used the political equipment and email for some official business, presumably so that no "paper trail" would be left behind. Indeed, instead of a paper trail, in each case, the investigators requested relevant emails but it was found that those emails were handled on the RNC machines and thus were destroyed.
So part of the legacy of the Bush Administration is a blueprint for obstruction of justice.
I disagree that this is a non-story. I worry that this will now be added to the toolkit of future administrations. Every administration will thinks it knows best for the country and some will want to get around all these pesky laws.
I am perplexed by this complaint. I hear it a lot, but I never see anyone going either 50 or 55 MPH in the left lane. What I see is that when I am in the left lane doing 75 - 80 MPH, invariably someone comes up behind me and tailgates me. Usually, I am going the same speed as the car in front of me with about 5 car lengths ahead of me. If I choose to move over one lane, I see the car just pull right up behind the next car.
If I don't feel like being tailgated, I will go in the "#2 lane" and accept a speed down to about 70 MPH. But I never see a car doing 55 in the fast lane.
I think there is a small army of people who drive fast until there is a car 10 feet in front of them and then back off the accelerator.
This is in California and the speed limit is generally 65 MPH but sometimes 55.
Indeed. I didn't realize until about 5 years ago that relays are still used in safety-rated applications such as train control and power control logic.
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The comparison I made 91% top federal tax rate to 35% top federal tax rate. You seem to be
adding current local taxes and your double social security (aka self employment tax).
They had state and local taxes in the 1960s too.
Our government doesn't not cut spending because of politicians stranglehold on power.
Government spending does not get cut because government spending is popular.
Some voters say "don't cut education, we need to invest in our future."
Some voters say "don't cut defense, we need to be strong in a dangerous world."
Some voters say "don't cut farm subsidies, we need to save the family farm."
Lots of voters say "don't cut Social Security, I paid into that for years and I deserve my share."
Some voters say "don't cut police and fire."
Voters hate taxes. Voters love their favorite government program.
Many people think there is this magic "government waste" which is really someone else's
favorite program.
One thing you and I agree on is that neither party reduces the National Debt.
Reagan and GHW Bush tripled the national debt. Did you complain about it then?
Suddenly Republicans are worried about the debt. They didn't seem too worked up about
it from 1980 through 1992. They didn't worry about it for the last 8 years.
I have been a 1099 contractor before and have paid the self-employment tax in the past.
Now I am an employee and my employer has been doing "more with less" even when he got the Bush
tax cuts. I know him on a first name basis. I appreciate the risks he takes to keep the
doors open. But I don't have the same point of view as either him or you.
I have been paying my taxes for almost 30 years now and you don't see me crying martyr over it.
Man up.
If taxes are raised, small businesses will have a harder time hiring more people and keeping
the employees they have. If the Obama Administration and Democrat controlled congress did not spend money on a stimulus bill like this, small businesses would still shed employees because people have less credit, are scared and spending less.
I live in California and I'm staying put. There is plenty of infrastructure to work on here
and I will be paid to do my part.
Before I recently looked it up, I remember there being a 90% tax bracket in the US. But that was a long time ago.
Then I looked it up. In the early 1960's, that was when the top tax bracket was slightly more than 90%. Now, the top tax bracket is 35%. So if you are on the top end of the US
income distribution, your taxes have been going down for the last 50 years.
So if you are quite wealthy, your taxes have been going down down down for 50 years. When
politicians say "were going to have tax cuts," guess who gets the biggest share?
God forbid a politician say he is only going to raise taxes on people who make more than $200,000!
Somehow, the right has gotten most of us to identify with the wealthy and act as if their taxes are our taxes. Maybe its because as Americans we can all imagine starting a business and
becoming a millionaire. But most people don't. Even most business owners don't make a million.
It seems to me that cutting taxes for the wealthy to create jobs for the rest of us has been
tried over and over again and where are we now?
Many economists think that creating jobs though public sector jobs is less efficient than through the private sector. But this approach has been tried over and over since the 1980 Reagan revolution and where are we now? I say lets give public sector job creation a chance.
The private company I work for gets nearly all its money from the public sector.
I let a lot of my early programs go. I had them on 9 track digital tape, at 6250 bpi. I had converted some of them from the lower bpi rates before. It used to be that each employer I worked for had one of those tape drives and I could access the files
when I wanted to. But not anymore. Besides, would I really want to convert FORTRAN programs?
In theory, I could have kept converting them to newer and newer storage media, but I didn't.
Later on, I had one of those QIC tape drives that could hook up to a floppy disk controller.
I think I have those files backed up on a hard disk somewhere -- I think. When I was going through old backups one year, I noticed I had the same directories appearing many many times.
I spent hours selecting the best version of everything and then backing up that too.
I haven't digitized all my vinyl record albums either, even though it is theoretically possible.
I have not scanned all the 35 mm slides or prints I took going back to the 1970s. At some point, the new stuff going on in your life gets more interesting than converting the stuff that used to get you excited 25 years ago.
Imagine how hard it is going to be to preserve people's papers after their dead. Do you want to keep converting someone else's stuff when you have a few terabytes of your own to attend to?
I think I even let the mainstream media convince me that my bank, Washington Mutual, went
out of business!
Why they even know where I live tried to tell me that the house next door went into foreclosure!
In all seriousness, I noticed with interest when Alan Greenspan testified that he was surprised
that lending institutions did not protect their own long term interests and instead went
for short term profits in massive and questionable loan originations.
Personally, I think it is pointless to argue over whether the current administration is to blame
for all this. I think that there is plenty of blame in the private sector. To a certain extent,
both major parties supported the following positions:
- never say you are going to raise the average person's taxes
- never reduce the national debt
- never reduce total government spending
- never tell Americans they have to sacrifice
- deregulation is great!
- globalization is great!
I think that if we all let go of worrying about our favorite political party
looks good or bad, we can start talking about whether these policies we've had
should be continued and what we can do to get our country out of this mess.
I remember taking partial differential equations from the Math department as a Physics undergrad.
My friend also took the class as an Electrical Engineering undergrad.
The math students were having a really tough time picturing what we were talking about but we
Physics and EE students had already seen Electro-Magnatism in Physics. We could look at the
equations and see a physical problem that matched it.
One week, there was a problem assigned that the Math TA could not solve. My friend and I had
solved it the night before, fueled by beer and pizza (as was our habit) and he went to the
board to show the rest of the class.
So as a gross generalization, the Math people are more rigourous, skipping fewer steps and avoiding "hand-waving." While the Physics people have a good picture in their mind as to
what the math means. Physics people rarely study math that has no physical application.
Math people take abstract algebra and Physics people rarely do. Physics people use non-commutative algebra without taking all the rigorous background.
In my opinion, these accidental releases of radioactive material pale in comparison
to the atmospheric tests the US used to do before it was
banned in 1963.
Here are some of the tests.
I've tried the "do your research, then buy the stock" approach. If I was honest and
tracked the return of all my trades over time, I never really beat the S & P 500.
Now I am following an approach detailed in Ric Edelman's "The Lies About Money."
The result is 14 positions, all but are one ETFs. His point is that the secret is not the
big gain but avoiding the big loss. With certain stocks losing 90% of their value,
trading stocks is taking the chance that you won't be holding one of those turkeys.
So when you are holding one of those turkeys and it is down 25%, psychologically you don't
want to let go of it so you hold on for another 10% loss. And another and so on.
Once you have taken such a loss, you would have to really hit several out of the park just
to break even again.
With 13 ETFs, I am in thousands of stocks and I will barely notice if one of them goes
out of business. When the business articles are saying "switch to value stocks" I watch
my growth ETFs go down and my value ETFs go up. When everybody gets scared, I watch the stock
ETFs go down and the treasury bond ETFs go up.
I never have to decide what the next hot thing is going to be. I just maintain the asset allocation ratios. If a position in the portfolio exceeds the target percentage by 20%,
I sell the amount it is over. Likewise if the position drops 20% below the target percentage,
I buy the amount to restore it. So I end up buying low and selling high.
Since I switched to this approach, I have been beating the S & P 500 in a down market.
So what you think is dilution is actually just avoiding big losses, from which you will never
recover.
I like Comedian Ron White's routine about this. He starts out by saying his mother called all upset:
"I just heard on the news that we're at terror threat level orange, what do I do?"
He says "I don't know."
Then he says "Nobody knows."
His system has two levels:
1) "find a helmet
2) "put on the damn helmet"
In the event of an emergency, the terror alert level will raise to "find a helmet," in which you should find a helmet.
If the threat is real, then the alert level will raise one step higher to "put on the damn helmet."
At least everybody knows what to do. I suppose the TSA folks and law enforcement have some different list of things
they do at different levels. For us civilians its:
Yellow: be alert, report suspicious packages, etc.
Orange: be more alert, report suspicious packages, etc.
I love how so many people act as though the ticket vending machines are equivalent to "the entire city's public transit." Having the TVMs hackable until they patch the code will only impact revenue slightly. Note you can accomplish the same thing by jumping over the turnstyles.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, they give everybody free rides when the air quality gets too bad.
There are not that many vendors of TVMs and each transit system has custom requirements.
Security researchers are in a catch 22. If they don't publish vulnerabilities publicly, they
never get fixed. If they do, they never get thanked. It goes with the territory.
You will only get the admiration of your fellow geeks, not the population as a whole.
Given that this has been a headline for at least 12 hours now, I did some reading.
A motive that was given in this news account
was that he was working on a vaccine for Anthrax and wanted to test it.
There was also some evidence that before the 2001 anthrax attack, he had conducted tests outside of normal work protocol. His attorney stated that he had been cooperating with the FBI for more than a year. There is also a report that he was forcibly removed from his job due to his becoming unstable.
The impression I get is that he had psychological problems that drew the attention of authorities. Those same problems may have
made it hard to deal with the pressure of an FBI investigation of more then 12 months.
There are reports of evidence that in he same time frame as the attacks, he removed anthrax material from work to do his own tests.
These tests may or may not have been related to the attacks themselves. There are also reports that he was about to be indicted.
I count myself in the group of developers that used Linux for a few years, then switched back to Windows.
I had and have one PC at home. To run Linux, I set that machine up dual or triple boot. I was running Red Hat for a while until they changed it into Fedora. I worked with Fedora for a while, but they had a bug with dual booting that they would not only not fix, but called it a feature. I got as far as the version of Fedora that had SELinux in it. Someone told me "Debian is better." I had that as a partition for a while. But I like trying out new software development frameworks and that made for incompatible library versions and apt-get didn't help. I mostly kept with the Fedora, fought the SELinux configuration and got it under control. Then the one PC died.
At this point, I had spent huge amounts of time fiddling with Linux and faced more basic problems, like knowing how much money I had in my checking account.
So I went out and got another PC with Windows pre-installed. It came with Quicken, which I already knew how to use. Later, when I really got into digital photography and purchased Adobe Photoshop Elements. It not only seemed more intuitive then GIMP, it also allows you to organize your photos within the program. When I started shooting RAW mode with my DSLR, it handles that quite nicely too. I also got an iPod and started listening to more music than I had in years.
Since I was no longer trying to keep running Linux, it was not a problem.
This is despite the fact that I have spent 25 years developing software and have many years of Unix experience. I might have thought all that time spent becoming familiar would help me at work. Maybe it did a little. My employer had one contract that I worked on which familiarity with Linux played a role. But otherwise, my employer has about 70 employees, no IT department, and as far as I know, no one else who knows Linux. If I were successful in introducing anything there that ran under Linux, guess who would be supporting it? They have me doing this other job that would not go away while the Linux training and support ramped up.
In my regular job, I select hardware to install as part of integrated systems. I may deal with 20 or 30 such devices while traveling to the customer job sites. All of them either have web configuration or require you to install a support program under Windows. If I were to adopt the stance that I would only run Linux on my work laptop and reject equipment that did not support Linux, we would not be able to complete our jobs and would have a hard time explaining to the customer why we could not complete the job. Actually, I would just get fired and they would hire someone who doesn't have a problem running Windows on their work laptop.
So I run a mix of closed and open source applications on Windows and am happier since I gave up depending on Linux. I have all that free time now to pursue other things. If I want to run Linux, I can boot a Knoppix CD. But I don't really do that very much anymore.
I have been following this story in the San Francisco Chronicle.
According to their reporting, he was asked by management for the passwords. He said no.
Then he was asked by police for the passwords. He still said no.
Then they had him arrested.
The reporting by various news organizations has been marred by confusion
on the part of reporters and average people between controlling network hardware and controlling
data on various servers. They often seem to describe it as data being
stored on the network he controlled.
It has been my experience that non-technical people do not really know what a server is.
These days, most people have an idea what a network is (like the Internet). So they
think either their data is stored on their desktop/laptop or it is stored on the network.
If it is true that he sometimes did not write the router configs to flash, that sounds to
me like a "deadman switch." If he got hit by a bus, how would they service the UPS that
backs up the router? The batteries eventually need to be replaced. He may have built it
so that he had to be around for years to keep it running. It is running fine for now,
but they can't power anything off without potentially losing its configuration.
One city official essentially said something like "Worst case, we hire someone to reconfigure
or replace the entire network."
Since he plead not guilty, he will get a trial to determine if what he did was criminal.
I haven't seen the movie yet, but I heard an interview with Andrew Stanton.
It was interesting where he got a lot of the ideas for the movie. He also talks about traditional animation versus CG and how CG really helped his career because
his drawing skills were ok but not great.
There are two sides of national politics, principles and compromise.
Senator Obama reversed himself on retroactive immunity because he felt the FISA bill was a good compromise.
I can't site it but I remember him being quoted as saying there were adequate protections
in the bill and that overcame his objections to retroactive immunity.
Where this is a change from the past seven years is this:
Our current president is known for is never changing his mind no matter what happens. People used
to think that was a virtue, but look what has happened. Bush will say over and over that he will
veto a law that contains "X" where X is some principle he is against. As a result, there has been
no movement on some issues.
Obama is showing that he is the opposite. He will compromise with people he disagrees with and
change his mind. Some may see that as expedient. I see that as a good alternative to having
two groups stand on opposite sides of the room never reaching an agreement while big problems
go readdressed.
As a lifelong Democrat with left of center views, I struggle between being pissed off at
Democrat Senators (like Dianne Feinstein) who often vote against my own opinion and also
wanting all these legislators to work together and make some headway against the growinglist of problems our country faces.
Sure I'm upset at retroactive immunity. But I can't vote on only one issue because I think
that the environment, the deficit, the falling dollar, rising oil prices, immigration,
health care are also important.
The struggle for me is that on the one hand, I want Democrats and Republicans to work together
to solve some of these problems. On the other hand, I'm not always happy with the result.
If a politician signals that they are never going to change their vote, then no one bothers
to change the bill in order to get your vote.
If you can find someone who sticks to their principles and never changes their mind, go ahead
and vote for them. But that sounds like what we have had for the last 7+ years -- same old same old.
> If you really believe that anything that doesn't support IPv6 at this point is "legacy" you clearly haven't tried to implement it. A few things off the top of my head:
>
> * Cisco IOS will route IPv6, but it does doesn't do it in hardware (it forces the packet up to the totally underpowered CPU of the router), so the packet rates are pathetic compared to IPv4.
>
Is that true of CISCO layer 3 switches? I'm just curious. It was my impression that layer 3 switches did their routing in hardware. The routers, which have WAN ports, do things in software.
They both run IOS.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
A friend of my Mom's had this happen to their family.
They came home from a trip, came upon armed buglers in their home. The bad guys already had the drop on them.
The father went for the gun in his briefcase. He was shot dead. His son was injured in the same incident.
You might think you can sort all this stuff out and make the right decision when it happens. Or you might get
angry or scared or overcome by the desire to protect your family and wind up dead.
Maybe you think you are smarter and would be able to trick the guy with the gun on you. Hey, it happens a lot
in the movies. Let's hope you never find out.
Also by having guns in your household, you run the risk that one of your household becomes so distraught that
they would use the gun on themselves or someone else in your family.
Let's say that your wife decides you are cheating on her and sobbing and finds your gun just before you get home.
What might have been an argument can instantly turn into someone getting killed.
So on the one hand, the gun might make you safer. On the other hand it might make you less safe. The way the
US constitution is today, you get to choose. I choose not to have guns. You might choose differently.
I think a big reason we are not drilling offshore - the reason for the ban -- is the
1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill. This caused a lot of average folks to join the environmentalists and push for the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the offshore drilling ban.
Now you don't hear so much about rivers catching fire, GE dumping huge amounts of PCBs in the Hudson River, LA has better air than it used to. Acid rain was also brought under control. In a way,
offshore oil drilling in the past created the power the environmental movement in the recent past.
But fewer and fewer people remember seeing pictures of California beaches covered in oil and dead birds.
If the ban were lifted, it would be at least 10 years before the oil and gasoline would make it to the market. As we go past peak oil, on our way to producing a fraction of potential demand,
we as a country have to decide how much of the environment we want to risk in the transition away from oil. It is a political decision and no doubt will be a issue in the election.
After working hard all year to pay bills, buy things, and drive back and forth to work, I need nice natural places to go on vacation to. I have lived in California since the 1970s and I can
tell you the beaches are great. Some of them are part of the Pacific Flyway and have lots of different bird species. I like Point Reyes and Bolsa Chica particularly.
But that's just my opinion.
Our political system for everyone motivated by their values to apply pressure into the process.
I think McCain is going to lose a lot of those Women's votes he was supposed to pick up from Clinton over the offshore oil drilling proposal. Pluralism at work!
This gets trotted out because it works.
The bulk of voters like big government but hate to pay taxes.
The politicians of both major parties know that when they try to make government smaller,
the people that benefit from the area being cut start squawking and taking their votes elsewhere.
Some people like a strong defense (big Department of Defense). Some people like farm subsidies
(protect the family farmer). Some people want more government employees to enforce existing
regulations (think SEC, EPA, USDA). Some people want NASA to get space colonies going --
mission to Mars! People actually like government but don't want to pay for it.
They vote for the person that tells them they can have all that AND A TAX CUT!
So the politicians talk about cutting taxes then talk some vague talk about government waste
but avoid specific cuts like the plague.
When the average voter cares about deficit spending more than tax rates, that's when we'll start
getting cuts in total government spending.
If you think of the recent Republican administrations (Reagan, Bush I, Bush II), which ones
cut the size of government? Which one put an end to deficit spending?
Reducing the size of government is political suicide.
Yes, it's a shame. I can honestly say that I use the OpenOffice spreadsheet every day
and it works great. I also really like OpenOffice draw and use the Writer and presentation
portions all the time.
But Base has a long way to go. (IMHO)
Have you used OO Base?
I was using it about a year ago and I found it buggy and hard to use. I was using it to access
PostgreSQL.
I like the other parts of OpenOffice that I use, Write, Calc, Draw.
Of course, I have not had time to look at it since then.
I think the worst example of this is the Heaven's Gate Cult.
;)
These people believed that a spaceship companion to the Hale-Bopp comet had arrived to take them to the "next level". They returned a telescope they had purchased when it failed to show the spaceship. Obviously the telescope was defective.
They all killed themselves in order to get on board the spaceship. Apparently, it never occurred to them to question their own beliefs.
Nuclear Power is subsidized by the U.S. Government in an interesting way.
In order for the first and any subsequent private nuclear reactors to even be built,
the Congress passed a law capping the amount nuclear reactor operators could be held liable. The operators are required to obtain $300 million per plant in insurance. If claims go beyond that, the industry is on the hook to provide a pool of money to pay claims beyond that $300 million. They are not required to provide this money until an accident occurs and even then, the payments per operator are capped at $15 million per year up to a maximum of $95.8 million. Any amount after that $395 million is to be picked up by the federal government and eventually the taxpayers.
It was felt by Congress that the private nuclear power industry would never get off the ground otherwise because private insurance would never cover potential liability. In addition, GE threatened to get out of the nuclear power business if this law was not passed.
(Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Hearings Before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy on Governmental Indemnity and Reactor Safety, 85th Cong., 1st sess., 1957, p. 148.)
Also, the government has agreed to ultimately take all spent nuclear waste. That is another function you would have a hard time having private industry take on.
Unlike HIPPA, which requires destruction of data, the White House is subject to the various laws mandating the preservation of all presidential records.
This includes the Presidential Records Act of 1978. This states that upon leaving office, white house documents become the property of the government. A different law, the Hatch Act, prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan political activities.
In order to address the Hatch Act, about 88 people who work in the White House were given separate computers purchased by the Republican National Committee and given email addresses in the domain gwb43.com, georgewbush.com, and rnchq.org.
It appears that White House staff consciously used the political equipment and email for some official business, presumably so that no "paper trail" would be left behind. Indeed, instead of a paper trail, in each case, the investigators requested relevant emails
but it was found that those emails were handled on the RNC machines and thus were destroyed.
So part of the legacy of the Bush Administration is a blueprint for obstruction of justice.
I disagree that this is a non-story. I worry that this will now be added to the toolkit of future administrations. Every administration will thinks it knows best for the country and some will want to get around all these pesky laws.
I am perplexed by this complaint. I hear it a lot, but I never see anyone going either 50 or 55 MPH in the left lane.
What I see is that when I am in the left lane doing 75 - 80 MPH, invariably someone comes up
behind me and tailgates me. Usually, I am going the same speed as the car in front of me
with about 5 car lengths ahead of me.
If I choose to move over one lane, I see the car just pull right up behind the next car.
If I don't feel like being tailgated, I will go in the "#2 lane" and accept a speed down to about
70 MPH. But I never see a car doing 55 in the fast lane.
I think there is a small army of people who drive fast until there is a car 10 feet in front of them
and then back off the accelerator.
This is in California and the speed limit is generally 65 MPH but sometimes 55.
Indeed. I didn't realize until about 5 years ago that relays are still used in safety-rated applications such as train control and power control logic.
These "vital relays" are made today by Union Switch and Signal
and Alstom.
Certain applications, which by law must use safety-rated components, include relays.